


Good Morning, Mr. Lennon

by SegaBarrett



Category: Original Work, The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Coming of Age, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-11
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2020-02-29 20:50:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18785959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett
Summary: Coming of age in the shadow of the Dakota. Starts August 1980.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do, of course, not own John Lennon.

The decision to move to New York City, center of the world, had apparently been made with some trepidation by my father. He had been offered a promotion to Associate Professor at New York University, which is apparently a big deal or something.

“It’s going to be a fortune to live in Manhattan,” he was grumbling again as we stepped off of the Greyhound bus that had brought us, and all of the things we had decided to take with us from Salem, Virginia, to the Big Apple.

Us, as always, consisted of just my father and little old me, Esparanza, age sixteen. Small town transplant. He had wanted me to grow up in a small town with good schools, he had told me two hours into our trip, but this was just too good to pass up.

Our apartment was at the corner of 72nd and 10th Avenue, and we were eleven flights up. We could peek out the big glass window, peek down at the people walking around, busying around, lights flickering on and off in every skyscraper.

“You know who lives here?” my father asked, as he pointed out in the vast landscape of the city.

“Everyone?” I suggested. Well, it wasn’t Los Angeles, of course. That was where the movie stars lived. But a lot of famous people were up here too, weren’t they? I just couldn’t put my finger on them by name.

“John Lennon,” my father told me. My eyes went wide.

“I thought he lived in England!” I sucked in a breath. I lived in the same city as John Lennon? There was a non-zero chance that our paths could cross at some point? What would I do with that information over than go slowly insane? 

“He lives in New York since… eight years ago.”

“…Where?”

“At a big apartment building called the Dakota. It’s not very far away. I was thinking… before school gets started, maybe you could head down there and see him. I just don’t want this whole experience to be… depressing, for you. I know it’s hard for you to leave in your junior year…”

I looked down. He wasn’t wrong; it was hard. All of my friends were left behind; how was I supposed to meet new people and make friends? What if everyone just ignored me and I graduated with no friends at all, or worse, what if they bullied me?

I could still remember the kids back at my old school walking behind me, yelling “Quack! Quack!” and “Way to go, Four Eyes!”

What if it happened all over again? That would make it clear that it was me that was wrong, not them. I felt a shiver go up my spine and I tried to forcefully shake it off. There was no need to be nervous; not about that.

After all, I lived in the same city as John Lennon. That was something to be way more nervous about.

***

I didn’t go down there the first day, or the second. I did, however, spend time running back and forth between the walls of my bedroom, silently screaming. If I did go down there and I saw him, I would probably just clam up or scream in his face or something equally embarrassing. So why should I even do that to myself?

But then, what if I passed up my chance to meet him, and I was a million years old in a rocking chair talking about how for a while I lived near John Lennon but I was too scared to actually go talk to him? 

I walked out into the living room, then opened the door to the apartment and stepped out into the hallway.

“Hey! Are you new?”

I turned around quickly and gasped. There was a girl around my age standing there. She was Asian-American, with long black hair, and she was wearing a pullover and a pair of khakis. 

“I am,” I managed, sticking my hands in my pockets. “Are… you… uh… not new?”

“I’ve lived here for a couple years,” the girl replied, “In this apartment, I mean. I’ve lived in New York my whole life.” She smiled at me. “I’m Mellie Yang, by the way. And you are…?

“Esparanza Baez,” I blurted. “It’s nice to meet you. I was kind of afraid I wouldn’t meet anyone. Where do you go to school at?”

“Oh, I go to LaGuardia,” she said, “It’s like, an arts and music school. Hey, you should go too. We could take the subway together.” 

I gasped, swallowing. I realized I didn’t even know where I was going to go to school at. Was there any way I could get into an arts and music school? But I didn’t really have any better ideas, either.

“Let’s do it!” I declared, “I’ll get an application and I’ll apply.”

“What will you study?” Mellie asked.

My mouth hung open a little bit. I’d have to make a decision and stick with it so that I didn’t look like a flighty flake in front of my first new friend.

“….Theatre.”

She brightened.

“I’m going to do fashion design. I used to be in pageants and I would design my own outfits… but what I really want to do after all this is to go to medical school.”

“How will you fit all that, though?”

Mellie shrugged.

“I probably won’t sleep.”

***

“Do you think we can find a place for this?” I asked, holding up a tiny framed picture of John Lennon. I hadn’t even realized that I had packed it, or that I even had it. It was of him during A Hard Day’s Night, smiling into the camera. I imagined that he looked very different now – if I saw him on the street, would I even recognize him?

“You could probably put it on the bookcase if you moved your clock around,” my father replied. “Do you remember when you got that?”

“No, not actually.”

“You were ten, and you wouldn’t stop watching A Hard Day’s Night. You wanted one of those little tape players like they listen to in the train scene.”

I brightened. It really had made an impression, though I remembered that for years afterwards I had thought they had all had headphones that connected to the same tape player, for some reason, and had been intrigued by finding out if such a thing existed. Despite it not being in the movie, I had managed to purchase a headphone splitter somewhere along the line, though I had never had occasion to use it because none of my friends listened to the same music as I did.

“Are you going to go see him for real?” my father asked a moment later. 

I sucked in a breath. Go see him for real. I could… I really could. But what in the world would I say?


	2. Chapter 2

“You want to go to the Dakota, huh?” Mellie asked as we sat in a pair of chairs around her dinner table. Her parents owned a Chinese restaurant that was down the street, and they were out of the house most of the day, leaving Mellie and I free to do as we pleased. Within the last three days, I had discovered that I liked this quite a lot.

“Well, no, of course not,” I blurted out, because wouldn’t I just sound like a completely creepy stalker if I said yes? I mean, it was his home after all. Then I paused and admitted in a tiny voice, “…yes?”

“We can go down, you know. It’s no big deal. I heard he walks around like just any old person. Penelope saw him a few times, but she didn’t talk to him.”

“Penelope?”

“Penelope Clark. My other friend. We’ll run into her eventually. I think she’s on vacation with her family down South right now.” Mellie shrugged. “Anyway, let’s go down and see if we can find him. It’s still pretty early, maybe he’s come back for dinner or something.”

“Oh! I mean, I couldn’t interrupt him in the middle of dinner or anything.” I hadn’t realized that my fingers had begun to shake against the wooden rungs of the chair. 

“We won’t be interrupting him in the middle of dinner. We’ll just see if he’s outside his apartment anyway. Quick ‘hi’ and ‘bye’.”

“Won’t we be bothering him?” I asked. I was ready to turn back around and run back into my apartment. There was no way that I could look at John Lennon and form coherent words; it was simply impossible. 

And what about that phrase about “never meet your idols”? What if I met him and he turned out to be a real…

“Come on!” Mellie declared, “Let me call Penelope and she can meet us there. It’s time for you two to meet, anyway.” She picked up the phone and a few minutes later, she was pulling me out the door again.

I followed her down the steps to the sidewalk and the next thing I knew, we were climbing down yet another set of stairs to the A-B-D line stop. 

“Where are we going?”

“72nd and Central Park West.”

My heart began to pound, and it was like my throat was closing up. With each increasing stop, it felt like the walls were closing in on me. I should just get up and run – I couldn’t do this. 

And yet, that didn’t seem to be an option, just a safety bar clicking shut on a roller coaster that was going to keep going. And no matter what happened, I was pretty sure that I was about to start screaming before too long.

Hadn’t Mellie seen every episode of every TV show where the cool, hip actor or rock star turned out to be nothing but a louse, and the main characters learned their lesson at the end of the day that fame was just a smokescreen? Did I really want to have that kind of encounter with someone whose poster was still hanging on my wall and whose picture was propped up on my side table?

I could still turn around and go…

“Come on, Esparanza. Don’t be scared.” Mellie flashed a smile. “I know he’s a big deal, but just remember that he’s really just a guy at the end of the day.”  
I sucked in a breath. A guy, just a guy, a real guy, really real but – he was really, really John Lennon and it could never end well when a legend came down from on high, could it? 

My hands were shaking and, unbidden, I remembered the girls crowding around me, yelling, “Sanctuary! Sanctuary!” after the prettiest girl in class decided to tell everyone I looked like Quasimodo. 

My throat was dry. 

“Look, Esparanza,” I heard Mellie say. Her voice seemed like it was far away and that it was tapping against my ear instead of being anywhere I could truly here it. “There he is, right there, in front of his apartment. We can catch him.”

I froze. I didn’t want to catch him; I didn’t want him to laugh at me and I didn’t want to feel stupid all over again. 

But Mellie’s hands gave me a short shove forward and I found myself standing on the concrete in front of an enormous building, in front of a sign that warned “Only Authorized Persons Past This Point.” I was certainly not authorized to do anything.

“Excuse me, Mr. Lennon!” Mellie proclaimed. I wanted to sink into the concrete as far as I could go. I tried not to look, but there he was. He was wearing a long black jacket and wearing sunglasses. “My friend here really wants to meet you, but she’s shy.”

I opened my mouth and made a noise that sounded like a keen.

John Lennon stuck out his hand.

“Hi. I’m John.”

“I’m Esparanza. That means ‘hope’!” I exclaimed, reaching out and shaking his hand as I stared at him.

“Well,” he said with a smile. “I’ll be sure to remember you. You have to have hope.” 

I opened my mouth and closed it again, before blurting, “Have a good morning. Mr. Lennon.”

“You too, Esparanza.”

I was going to cry and never be able to stop, I just knew it.


	3. Chapter 3

And I did cry, full on sobbed actually, all the way home from 72nd Street. Mellie watched me with an expression that was somewhere between amusement and worry, as if she wasn’t sure if she should call a doctor or just keep watching. 

Once we got back to our apartment, I ran back and forth in the room for a few moments, waving my hands. Mellie watched from the couch, scratching her cheek and wearing a bemused expression.

“Are you done now?” Mellie asked, laughing. “Didn’t I tell you that it would be just fine?”  
There was a knock on the door.

“Are you two all right?”

“Oh, that’s Penelope!” Mellie exclaimed. “She made it. She’s just here in time to watch you completely freak out, I guess. Can I let her in? I think you two will hit it off.”  
I dragged my hands over my face.

“Sure, let’s meet her!” I replied, unable to really focus on anything other than the fact that I had met John Lennon. The John Lennon, the one and only. And most of all, he had been nice, the unattainable celebrity meeting dream. 

He had heard my name, and he had said it, correctly even. My name had come out of John Lennon’s mouth. I mulled over it, trying to make sure that I remembered every little thing that had happened.

Mellie stood up and opened the door. A slim, dark-skinned girl with her hair in a series of small braids poked her head in.

“Uh, hi?” she began. “I don’t feel like I can just walk in on here since it’s not my apartment, but Mellie said to come over here – so here I am. Please stop me from having to continue talking.”

“Hi,” I said, walking up to her. “You can come in. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you aren’t a serial killer. Because… what’s that joke? It would be really unusual for there to be two serial killers at the same apartment?”

Penelope chuckled.

“I think we’re going to get along just fine,” she said, walking in.

“Today is a great day,” Mellie announced, “Esparanza just completed her life-long dream. She met John Lennon.”

“And he’s here, I mean, I can come see him any time I want to. I mean, I don’t want to scare him off or anything, so it isn’t like I would go by all the time,” I explained quickly, before I seemed like a weird stalker. “But just knowing that he’s there… and that he’s nice. I’m not explaining it right. Hi, I’m Esparanza, and I’m a nutcase.” I extended my hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too. So, wait, John Lennon lives around here? It seems like everybody lives around here, or something.”

“Center of the world, isn’t it?” I exclaimed, bouncing up and down.

The door opened again, and my father entered, looking between me, my friends, and my general outburst.

“Uh, hey, Esparanza. How’s it going?”

“I met him!” I exclaimed, jumping up and down.

“You’ll rattle the ceilings – be careful,” my dad cautioned, “Downstairs might call the cops. And anyway – met who?”

I let out a loud, impatient whine. 

“John Lennon!”

“What was he like?” my father asked, pulling a folding chair up to the table and taking a seat. 

“I don’t really know,” I admitted. “It was all so quick. But he was nice.”

I looked around at the others and gasped.

“I live here,” I announced suddenly, “I can come see him any time I want.”

***

Of course, it wasn’t as easy as all of that, because you can’t just keep walking past someone’s place and not get looked at like you are some kind of a stalker.  
However, as the school year primed to begin, after I received an acceptance letter for LaGuardia (who referred to my short story as “spirited”), I had a plan. 

I pointed to the oversized chart paper that I had propped against my wall, pointing to it with a magic marker.

“Comrades,” I began. “If we leave the apartments for school at exactly seven-ten in the morning, we have ample time to make a quick loop around the Dakota in order to…”

“Stalk John Lennon,” Penelope provided.

“We are not stalking, my friends. We are… making sure that he is okay. He could trip over the sidewalk and what if no one is there to help him up?”

“I think Yoko would help him,” Penelope suggested.

“It’s no use,” Mellie interjected. “She’s determined to save John from the concrete of doom, and we truly have no escape.”

I stuck my tongue out at her and continued to gesture to my chart.

“We can find a perfect, uh, circumference around him in which we are both friendly and non-stalkerish,” I continued, “So that we provide a presence that is favorable to his day.”

“You’re making us sound like plants,” Penelope complained.

“I don’t know about you,” Mellie chimed in, “But I’m going to be a lemon tree.”

***

I was shaking uncontrollably when I boarded the B train at the corner and watched the doors close. For all of my plotting the days before, acting like a teacher at the front of the class or a general dictating the army’s next move, I was terrified and not even entirely sure what I was most terrified about. 

“Esparanza? You okay?” Mellie asked, leaning across the metal pole she was holding as we jockeyed for spaces in between the deluge of commuters. I wasn’t, but I couldn’t say that of course. 

I gripped the metal pole and let out a long sigh. 

We were going to see John Lennon again. And then, I was going to have the audition of my life.


	4. Chapter 4

My knees began to buckle the second I walked into my homeroom, which my schedule informed me was room 314. It was set up as a science lab, complete with benches and stools. Everyone sat around, quickly talking to one another, and I looked around for a friendly face, saddened to find neither Penelope nor Mellie sharing the homeroom with me.  
The girl next to me had a short haircut, only a little tuft of hair. It was hard to tell if she was looking at me or not, because we each seemed to only turn our heads towards one another when the other wasn’t looking. Was that a good thing or a bad thing?

The girl with red curly hair walking in the door, walking up to me and pointing at me with a grin.

“Wow, I didn’t know we were doing a production of the Hunchback of Notre Dame! But we must, though, cause here we have Quasimodo! Quasimodo, Quasimodo!”  
I let my eyes slip shut. 

My cheeks were burning. Everyone had to be looking at me, thinking that I was a country bumpkin. Was what I was wearing completely wrong? 

I looked around, trying to pick up on everyone else, how they were all acting. Mellie and Penelope had acted like I was fine, but maybe they were just being nice, or maybe they didn’t like me either and were secretly making fun of me behind my back?

I wanted to sneak off and cry, but there was nowhere to go.

The teacher, a white-haired man named Mr. Wynn, walked to the front of the room. 

“Hello, everyone, and welcome to homeroom here at La Guardia. Let’s try and make it an orderly process, so please all stop talking long enough so that you can raise your hand when I call your name. Other than that, you have fifteen minutes and I don’t really care what you do for them.”

***

I couldn’t stop thoughts of John Lennon from sneaking into my head as I sat in the middle of English class with The Crucible opened wide on my desk, my fingers pressing the spine down into a lop-sided crease. What was he doing now? How was I supposed to focus on anything, let alone The Crucible? It seemed horrible to picture so many people being pulled away and being threatened by being witches, but even worse were the thoughts at the back of my head that maybe that was the last time I would see John Lennon, that I had been close enough to meet him once but that was to be the sole highlight of a dreary life.

“Esparanza,” hissed a voice behind me, and I turned around in my seat to see Mellie looking at me. She indicated with a nod of her head that she had slipped a magazine inside the open book, showing writing in an alphabet I didn’t recognize.

“What are you reading?” I hissed back, peeking over in a way that, to be fair, could have been decidedly more subtle.

“Korean soap opera magazines,” she replied. “Where’s your head at? You look like you’re asleep.”

I hesitated, not wanting to tell on myself, and acutely aware that if I spoke too loud the entire classroom would probably hear me. I knew what would happen there – everyone would laugh at me and then the next thing I knew, I couldn’t even come in anymore.

“I keep thinking about John Lennon,” I said quickly, turning my head back around again. 

“I’m not surprised,” Mellie said, “You’re in love with him, I think.”

“That’s silly,” I said, “I mean I’m not in love with him. Like, not like that, I mean he’s married and he and Yoko are like… all, like…” I was babbling, so I shut my mouth, but not fast enough.

“Esparanza? What do you feel Abigail is saying in this section?”

I leaned forward and pinched my lips, scrunching up my face before looking down at the book. I had read the play before, and a lot of my takeaway was that Abigail was a spoiled little brat who needed to stop hitting on all the married men, but I assumed that that wasn’t the answer that my teacher wanted.

I leaned down and pressed my face nearly against the text – damn glasses – and managed to stammer out a few statements about some literary devices I had spotted in the passage, and the teacher moved on. I began to sank down in my seat, expecting the rest of the class to hoot and holler, to call me an idiot.

But they didn’t. Instead, I felt a hand nudge me near the end of class and mumble something about, “Oh man, that was pretty deep,” and another student chuckle and ask, “she got you, huh? Glad it wasn’t me, I had no idea what was going on!”

Maybe this school was going to be okay, after all.

***

After the end of the first day, I met up with Mellie and Penelope at the end of the block, hovering next to the subway entrance.

“So bored,” Mellie declared. “I hope we start doing real work soon.”

“Yawner,” Penelope agreed wholeheartedly. 

“Aren’t we supposed to be learning about like… acting?” Mellie continued.

“Well, I mean, I guess it’s coming,” I said, “It’s only the first day.” I stuck my hands in the pockets of my sweatshirt, unable to figure out a way to express everything that was going through my mind. The idea of being accepted – that felt weird and unusual and fake, even though that couldn’t be the way that it was supposed to be. 

“Yeah, I guess,” Mellie replied. “Maybe we just have to be patient.”

I sucked down a breath and blurted, “Hey, could we swing by the Dakota?”

“You don’t need to feel weird about suggesting it, you know,” Penelope said. “I mean, people come hang out near there all the time. It’s not like he’s going to think that you’re a stalker or anything.” She grinned conspiratorially at me. “…Well, at least not yet.”


	5. Chapter 5

I wondered what it was like to leave in the Dakota. It was such an imposing building; I wondered if John and Yoko lived at the very top and could look down on all the tiny people walking around Central Park.

How many of them were looking back up at John?

And how was I supposed to approach him again, without seeming super creepy? It just seemed to be a shame to live so close and to not reach out.

Like he wanted to be reached out to by me. Good grief. The man could talk to anyone in the world and in his retirement he had been set upon by a high school student. He would probably want to pack it all in once he saw me and go back to partying like he had been doing a few years ago, and I would have single-handedly been so obnoxious that I made John Lennon relapse. 

I let my feet touch the pavement right in front of the black gargoyles and rocked in my spot. Was I being a creepy stalker? Or what if I caught him on a bad day? After all, the man’s temper had gotten to be a bit legendary at this point. What if I unleashed the beast and he was ruined in my mind forever? 

A limo pulled up, a big black one, and I hung back. A lot of other famous people lived in the Dakota, I had to remember, and I should only subject one person at a time to, well, me.

He was standing there, then, stepping out of the limo and lighting a cigarette. I stepped forward and bit back some obnoxious comment about how smoking was bad for him, because that would probably result in him telling me where I could stick my concern. I wasn’t sure whether I would laugh or cry if John Lennon told me to shove it. Hell, I would probably have gone off and spent the next twenty years trying to shove it as effectively as possible.

I sucked in a breath and stepped into the light.

I nearly ran back and hid behind the building when his head popped up and he saw me, looked right at me and seemed to recognize me.

“Hello,” John Lennon called, and I froze it my spot all over again, nearly waving my hands in the sky like an idiot because here I was, squandering another chance to talk to the smartest man in the world and I was looking like a fish all over again.

“Hi,” I managed. “Sorry, I was just… walking by…”

“I remember you. Esparanza, right?” he asked, taking a step forward. 

My mouth dropped open and I must have looked like I was going to catch flies. I managed to slam it shut before nodding. 

“Sorry to bother you. I guess I just… ended up coming back.”

John smiled. He smiled at me – my pulse was racing and I couldn’t keep myself from grinning stupidly in response. 

“It’s normal when you have this much charm,” he joked. “Though people tend to get fed up with me after a while. Except Yoko, though. For some reason, she decided that she wanted to be here for the long haul.”

“How is she doing?” I asked.

“She’s doing well,” John replied, and I could have sworn I saw a blush start creeping across his cheeks. “And Sean is getting bigger ever day…”

“Sean!” I exclaimed, bouncing back on my feet, “I saw a picture of him in the paper…” Oh good, now I had made myself sound like somebody who sat around being creepy and thinking about people’s kids. 

To my surprise, John cocked his head to the side and let out a chortle.

“He’s more photogenic than me,” he said. “He’s going to be a little heartbreaker when he gets older, I think.”

I laughed nervously. 

“Well, I hope so. The next generation, huh?”

“You can’t say that,” John replied, “You’re part of the next generation.” He turned his head. “I’d better get in. It’s good to see you again, Esparanza. Stop by whenever you want, okay? Keep me up with the young people before I fade away.”

***

I ran around my room, screaming silently. He had talked to me again. He valued what I had to say – not that I was saying much of anything coherent at all – and he didn’t mind if I stopped by. I wouldn’t abuse the privilege, I promised myself.

Instead, I would be a completely respectable and respectful fan, and I would only avail myself of talking to John when I really needed to. When I needed to remind myself that there was something unique about me, though God knew what the hell that could be. It was like having shook the hand of the man who shook the hand of Jesus or one of those old legends. I was the girl who had talked to John Lennon, and he had remembered my name, and he had told me that I could come back.

I wouldn’t abuse this. I would treat my new station with the responsibility that it warranted.

And I would go back into school with my head held high; I would prove that I was worth all of this. It was easier said than done, of course – but I could do it. 

I could do it… right?

I started to run around again, flailing, hands in the air, wondering what I would tell Mellie and Penelope. Maybe I wouldn’t tell them anything and I would just keep it to myself, my own secret.

No… they had helped me to get to this place.

It was all of our wins.

And I would need both of their help.


End file.
